What Colors Are On Children's Books?

Last week I led a data collection activity in my child's Kindergarten class.

We began with a little game of Which One Is Different (adapted title of Which One Doesn't Belong; I'm sensitive to language around not "belonging" as related to being different... plus, the acronym WOID is pronounceable).

I had hoped to introduce this game using Christopher Danielson's WODB book a few days beforehand, so they were familiar with the game before my lesson. But it didn't happen, so I took a little risk in just jumping in with books. My child wanted to introduce the rules, which he did, and the kids jumped right in with noticing differences. It was magical. They noticed all sorts of things, including that The Book of Mistakes was the only one where the author's name was written in green, and Du Iz Tak is the only one where the title is written inside a cartouche (and we learned the word cartouche).

This was a primer for an activity of gathering data about the colors found on the books in the classroom. For this, the students were split into pairs, and we gave each pair one data collection chart and four books: two written in English and two written in French (it's a French-English bilingual school). I first modeled what they would do. For each book, they should put a mark in the row of each color that appears on the cover of the book. The chart looks like this:

I modeled with two books written in English, asked if there were any questions, and then asked for some predictions about what we might find. There were lots of blank faces, so I asked what color they thought would come up the most. Two kids  we then set up the pairs of kids.

Afterwards each pair came to me, and I recorded their data on a larger chart that I made ahead of time. I had built the chart with the intention of using post-it page flags, but when it came time to do it, I found that the page flags were a little fussy, so I just put check-marks in the boxes. They're not removable like the flags, but I decided that the efficiency of marker won over removability of flags.

Here are all of the individual data charts that the children made (with my demo chart on the far right):

Here is our compiled data:

We noticed that blue, black, and bleu were tied for the most books. One child thought that he saw equality between blue and yellow, and there was some discussion about that. Even with lines drawn on the charts, he was convinced that they were the same. There was a little noticing that the English books seemed to have more check marks in general. And we noticed that violet was used very little on the French books, which sparked a conversation among the teachers about how they don't see purple being used much in French culture, or in clothing.

I finished off by introducing the terms data and data scientist, in the context of what we did. I asked if they had any questions that might be answered by collecting data. Their response was crickets and blank stares.



Overall, it was super fun to come in and just do stuff with the kids. They really got into their tasks on the project. I think I had hoped for a little more participation on the noticing and wondering, and I was definitely hoping that they would have some fun ideas about what else they could collect data about, but I'm not all that surprised. Maybe the concept was too new for them to be comfortable with asking questions of their own, and having more subsequent activities would spark some ideas. Alas, the year is coming to an end, so I won't be able to do more activities. I still consider it to have been a delightful and worthwhile experience on its own.

Oh... one more thing: I realized about 40 minutes before the lesson that I had forgotten to learn all of the students' names. I quickly made an Anki deck from a pdf we got at the beginning of the year, and reviewed for about 10 minutes. I was able to call on each child by name, which felt really great. I haven't reviewed the deck again since that day, but today at the Kindergarten year-end performance, I was able to name all but 2 kids (in my head) when they came up on stage. I'm so using it to learn the names of students in my own classes in the fall.

Thoughts on Subtraction

Est. reading time: 20 min

Prologue

My first advice on teaching, when I first became a TA in my Master's program, was a 2-page list of Do's and Don'ts. I don't remember most of them, or even how many they were but I do remember the first three.

1. Know more than your students
2. Know a lot more than your students
3. Never tell your students everything you know.

This advice comes back to me approximately once a month, and its meaning always has subtle differences from the last time. I think it's extremely important advice. It's probably my most used benchmark for deciding how to participate in all sorts of discussions. The first point is a little "duh," but the second point makes you stop and meditate a little on the importance of the first. For anyone who has taught for more than 10 years, you get a sense of why 1 and 2 are important. But then, there's the importance of 3.  I thought 3 was a little silly and perhaps just a tad elitist for the first few years of teaching. But then, little by little, the power of 3 has crept up. I feel like, for me at least, there is a lot of wisdom in 3. Especially when it follows 1 and 2.

Here's an example.

Subtraction has been bothering me for some time now, and I've only recently started paying attention to this bother. I have been evolving the ways I've guided conversations around subtraction for the past few years, and I generally feel good about how the conversations go. However, I am always keenly aware of what parts of the conversation I'm leaving out (à la 3),  and I'm wondering what parts I should start adding in (yes, I note the pun of this sentence).

Brain Plasticity and Mindset in College Math Education

The world of math education is, these days, exciting, vibrant, and varied. I’m constantly finding wonderful new materials to use, new research to share, and new discussions to engage in.

One of my (many) struggles is this: so much of the research, and so many of the materials, are centered around K-12 students. I teach community college. My students are adults, some of them are well beyond their 20’s, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of them appreciate being treated as if they are 12. However, most of the materials and the research around K-12 math education (including some from middle school, and even elementary school) are relevant to these adult students, so I use them in my classroom. I spend a lot of time re-creating materials, not only to adapt them to my personal styles and curriculum, but often just to remove age branding. This week I’ve been using materials from the youcubed.org Week of iMath, and I didn’t have time to recreate all of the materials, so I used a pencil to scratch out “Grades 5-9” from the logo before making copies.